July 18, 1996

Publication title: The War Against Silence, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Glenn McDonald

Sarah McLachlan: Rarities, B-Sides & other stuff

Until last year, I would have laughed at the very idea of a Sarah McLachlan b-sides collection. Her single output through her first two albums was most remarkable for the total absence of new songs anywhere in it. Aside from a couple of covers, the rest of the track slots were made up of remixes (and not always new ones) and radio sessions, and while some of them are quite good, it would have been silly to make an album out of them, especially next to 1992’s limited edition live album, which featured several of the same songs. Around Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, though, Sarah loosened up a little, putting an impressive cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” on the single for “Good Enough”, contributing “I Will Remember You” to the soundtrack for The Brothers McMullen, covering “Dear God” (if stiffly) on the unfortunate XTC tribute Testimonial Dinner, and consigning my pick for the year’s fourth coolest song, “Full of Grace”, to the bowels of Nettwerk’s expensive tenth-anniversary box set Decadence. Suddenly a b-sides comp made some sense. I felt bad about telling even die-hard Sarah fans that “Full of Grace” justified buying a five-disc $60+ box, but a $20 import b-sides collection is a much more easily condoned indulgence.

And so here it is. Besides those four songs, it also has otherwise unavailable (I think) dance remixes of “Fear” and “Possession” (decent ones, too, not generic house loops with two-second samples of the singer’s voice on top, like on some recent Tori singles), old-fashioned pre-techno extended mixes of “Vox” and “Into the Fire”, both from the Vox single, the “Violin Mix” of “Shelter” from the Into the Fire single, the live version of “Drawn to the Rhythm” from the limited EP (fair, since “limited” appears to have been a genuine claim), the dark “Gloomy Sunday” cover from the Drawn to the Rhythm single, a Gordon Lightfoot cover (”Song for a Winter’s Night”, whose origin eludes me; I fear I have missed a Lightfoot tribute), and a Manufacture track called “As the End Draws Near” that Sarah sang on. For destitute completists keeping score, this is a good sample of the available obscurities, but it leaves out other remixes of “Steaming”, “Vox”, “Into the Fire”, “Fear” and “Mary”, radio versions of “Sad Clown” and “Black”, a MuchMusic performance of “Drawn to the Rhythm”, and a particularly good live version of “Good Enough” from that single. But if they put any more tracks on the disc they couldn’t fit the blurry QuickTime version of the “I Will Remember You” video on the CD-ROM portion, and I’m sure you’ll want to watch that time after time, memorizing the delicate nuances of pixels the size of Legos.